18 Best iPhone Apps For Meditation to Try Out

You may have already built your meditation routine and have been doing it consistently. However, you might have recently upgraded to an iPhone or bought an iPad or an iOS watch and still want to keep meditating, but you don’t know which apps are the best to work with.

Or maybe, you are new to meditation and you own an iOS device and would like to know the best apps to begin your meditation journey with.

Well, here are the 20 best iOS apps for meditation you should add to your consideration list as you go about choosing the ultimate meditation app for your new iOS device. The list includes the best meditation apps, both paid and free apps.

The 20 Best Meditation Apps For iOS

1. Headspace

Headspace is among the most popular meditation apps in the world. It helps people get started with and advance their mindfulness and meditation practices. Not only that, but it also helps with reducing stress, sleep, calming our monkey-like minds, and also overcoming various fears we may have. Beginners can work with the mindfulness and meditation courses and easily track their journey with the app.

For meditation, the sessions have a duration of about 10-20 minutes, although there are also shorter guides that go for about 3 minutes which can be used by people with busy schedules. Other than the courses, there are one-time pieces of training called singles which you can use to address specific areas of your life without having to commit yourself over a long period as with the courses.

Moreover, there are tools such as progress trackers, daily reminders, session timers, and information guides to help improve your overall experience with the app. To even make it sweeter, there is a community of people with the same meditation and self-improvement goals as yours with who you can interact with and better each other in the long run.
There is a kids’ section as well where your kids can go to improve themselves in a fun and interesting way.

Headspace has a free version but it comes with in-app purchases where you can upgrade to a paid subscription to access all that the app has to offer.

Here’s a detailed review of the Headspace app that explains almost everything you need to know about it.

2. Calm

Calm is another great app for meditation that is used by millions across the world. It is good for both beginners and advanced meditators to build upon their self-improvement practices. It is loaded with breathing exercises, guided meditations, and soothing music that are designed to enhance your overall meditation experience.

The sessions go for about 3-25 minutes and you also get nature sounds as well as white noise to help you block out any noise that may interfere with your practice. Some sessions like the sleep sessions work with celebrity illustrators such as Cillian Murphy, and Harry Styles to ensure you not only get to sleep well but also get to be soothed by one of your favorite celebrities.

Like Headspace, there is a free version of Calm with the upgrade option to access more features.

3. Buddhify

This is a paid meditation app that is created to suit the modern lifestyle and accommodate people who would like to meditate but have very little time to spare for that area. You get more than 200 meditation sessions created for various aspects such as traveling, stress, sleep, anxiety, and many others.

These sessions start from 3 minutes to 40 minutes. You are required to pay $5.99 to get access to the resources in Buddhify.

4. Insight Timer

Insight Timer is an app that provides a little over 45,000 guided meditation sessions that can be used for free. The sessions tackle different topics such as anxiety, mindfulness, performance, abundance and prosperity, spirituality, manifestation, visualization, yoga Nidra, and many others.

The meditation sessions as well as the meditation talks given by the app have been prepared by well-known meditation experts like Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Cornfield, to name a few.

On top of that, there are groups and communities for you to connect with other meditators from around the world and meditate together in real-time. You even get the opportunity to follow your favorite teachers to receive new teachings and sessions once they have been added to the app.

Other handy resources include mentoring, live events, workshops, and the ability to view your app statistics so as to know how well you’ve been doing in your self-development journey.

Insight Timer offers a free version that anyone can use but there’s also a paid version with all unlocked features.

5. Pranayama

Pranayama is an app that promotes healthy breathing exercises. Pranayama itself is two-worded in Sanskrit. The first word is prana, which means vital energy or life force. The second one is āyama, which stands for regulation.

It provides an easy-to-work-with course that is progressive, which is founded on yoga. With it, you slowly learn to reduce your breathing rate which helps you bring down high-stress levels, build your stamina and focus, and increase your energy levels.

You get visual guides in form of animations that help you breathe towards slow deep breathing. This kind of conscious breathing allows you to also regulate your blood pressure, deal with migraines, asthma, depression, and COPD, among others.

There are music hints that allow you to know the different phases in the app so that you prepare yourself well.
The pranayama lite app can be accessed for free but if you want to work with more features that come with the app, you should consider getting the premium version that goes for $5.99.

6. Spiritual Healing Meditation

This is a hypnotherapy-based app that is aimed at helping you clear the energy and karma blocks as well as promote the healing of energetic imprints. The app was founded by a hypnotherapist known as Glenn Harrold.

He was inspired to create the app after a shamanic retreat he attended in Panama. Within the app, you get 2 audio trackers, the sleep and awake tracks that go for a duration of about 38 to 41 minutes together with an ebook called “The ultimate guide to hypnosis” that comes with several hypnosis scripts that you can use to improve your life, as a beginner or advanced person in hypnotherapy.

The app works with the notion that we all have invisible energy around us that is well-informed about us across different lifetimes and people who are experienced in this area such as psychics, visionaries, and shamans can see the energy and decode the information it carries.

The hypnotic suggestions provided in the app will help you repattern your life, get rid of karmic patterns that you’ve been carrying with you through your lifetimes, raise your level of consciousness and bring about healing to your body energy. This will make you align to your true essence and nature.

To benefit from the app, you are required to pay $4.99 to unlock everything.

7. Relax Lite

Just like pranayama, Relax Lite is an app that uses progressive breathing exercises to help you slow your breathing rate and improve your overall health. The breathing exercises in the app can help you deal with migraines and headaches, boosting your focus, reducing heart rate and blood pressure, increasing your lung capacity, bringing about deep relaxation, sleeping well, and even handling anxiety.

The exercises have a duration of about 5 minutes although there is an 8-minute meditation session that directs your attention to various parts of your body. There is also cool music to help you relax and enjoy your experience with the app.
Relax lite is free but it is limited. To access everything, you’ll need to get the Relax app, which will cost you $3.49.

8. Omvana

Omvana is an app created by MindValley, which is a mental health organization that aims to teach people better ways to take care of themselves. The app comes with lots of meditation sessions that cover many topics including sleep, productivity, focus, performance, confidence, clarity of vision, fitness, and happiness among many others.

There is a background sound mixer you can work with to improve upon your sessions and even work with saved playbacks. The best part is that you can also use the Apple Health app to save your meditation sessions.

Omvana gives you 7 days free trial with the app, after which you can choose to upgrade to get the premium features.

9. MyLife Meditation

MyLife Meditation is one of the heavily user-focused apps in the App store. The app seeks to know what emotions you are experiencing when you open the app and they give you the platform to express yourself honestly and as best as possible.
After that, they take your input and they look for meditation tracks and other resources such as acupuncture videos and yoga poses that can help overcome the negative emotions you may be feeling.

There are reminders, progress tracking tools, and check-ins that will help you work smoothly with the app and make good progress on your self-improvement journey. The app is free with in-app purchases for premium features.

10. Oak

Oak is one of the most diverse meditation apps. It gives options for users who have different preferences and guides them through the process of establishing a meditation habit. To begin with, the app takes you from the first session to the 500th session, which is pretty much a year and some months.

And if you follow the sessions religiously, forming a meditation habit won’t be that hard for you. There are guided meditation sessions with both male and female instructors, so you can choose to work with the voice that speaks to your heart the most.

There are also options of choosing to be guided through your sessions or to meditate on your own. For the guided sessions, you can get a duration of 5 to 30 minutes and for the “do it yourself “ sessions you can go from 5 minutes all the way to 24 hours.

You can meditate in silence or use cool background sounds like stream sounds and bells, to enrich your sessions. You also get a 10 days course to help you learn mantra meditation along with breathing exercises and other tools like a session timer to ensure you get the best experience.

The app is free to use but to get all the features you have to pay for a subscription.

11. Ten Percent Happier

Ten percent (10%) happier is an app that has been based on the book “Ten Percent Happier” by Dan Harris. It is designed to help people who doubt the power of meditation give it a test and see how exactly it works and how powerful it can actually be.

Dan Harris himself never really believed in meditation, in the beginning, until he suffered a heart attack while on air at some point in his TV career. The meditation sessions here have been simplified and made fun so that they are interesting and interactive for the users.

They have been made by meditation experts such as Joseph Goldstein and Sebene Selassie, who you can contact and ask questions about meditation through their support section.

Meditation sessions go for about 3 to 25 minutes and can even be used by people who are busy to refresh and rest their minds before getting to work or during their short breaks.

There are many other features like progress tracking and the “mindful days” count for remaining mindful which you can access freely but which to unlock everything, you’d need a subscription.

12. The Mindfulness App

The mindfulness app contains more than 300 meditation sessions and courses curated by experts. The sessions have been translated to 10 different languages and they range from 3 minutes to 9 minutes.

Despite your current moods, or time of the day, or even whether you are a beginner or advanced meditator, you can launch the app and find something to help you get better.

With the variety offered, you can choose to be guided through your sessions, or do it yourself in silence or with the help of background sounds such as rain, forest sounds, or ocean waves.

There’s a 7 days trial that you can use to test the app and then choose either to pay $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year to get full access.

The subscription allows you to enjoy different features including offline access to the app’s resources and even newly uploaded content made by new self-improvement experts.

13. Meditation And Sleep Sounds by MindBliss

This app provides an array of resources with different mental health improvement techniques including meditation, brainwave entrainment, hypnotherapy, positive affirmations, advanced breathing exercises, visualization exercises, 3D nature soundscapes, relaxation sounds, and music, among many others.

The sessions will help you beat anxiety and stress, improve your sleeping patterns and confidence, to name a few. The recommendations you get are powered by Artificial Intelligence to help you find something that fits your exact needs. You can save your sessions to listen to them offline when you’re not able to access an internet connection.

You can also collaborate with Apple HealthKit to track your progress too.

There’s a free trial that lets you have 15 meditation sessions, 3 journeys, daily meditation sessions, and exercises which are quite handy considering they are free.

However, if you want to get all the awesome stuff you’ll need to part with either $11.99 per month or $89.99 per year.

14. Human Cosmos

Just like the name suggests, Cosmos is an app that combines neurology, genetics, Ayurveda, Buddhism, neurophysiology, astrology, ThetaHealing, energy practices, qigong, Reida, and other techniques to help you strike a good balance in different areas of your life.

It uses Artificial Intelligence to learn who you are and offer you recommendations that best fit your life to handle the problems you are struggling with and make your life more manageable and peaceful. It helps you deal with most of the symptoms you may be having of anxiety, stress, and depression.

You get taken through a process of diagnosis where you get a unique code that handles your identity which carries information about your personal attributes. The app then uses that code to give you proper recommendations to solve your current health problems.

The app can be accessed for free but to have an entire experience with it, you will need to upgrade to the premium version.

15. Complete Relaxation Lite

Complete Relaxation Lite is the free version of the Complete Relaxation app. There is also the Complete Relaxation Pro app that is paid for ($3.49) which has extra features. In essence, the free version allows you to work with well-designed guided meditation sessions for dealing with anxiety.

The sessions are combined with music composed by Christopher Lloyd Clarke, including his two most loved hypnotic tracks, “Heaven’s Gates” and “The Essence of Peace”.

16. Aura

Aura is named the “Spotify” of meditation. It is an app that works closely with Artificial Intelligence to come up with customized solutions that will help you handle different issues you may be having.

When you launch the app, you are given several options of areas you might want to use the app for, and you are allowed to choose a minimum of 2 options. Once you’ve done that, you are taken to a resource library that has meditation tracks, nature sounds, and stories that help with the optics you chose.

Life coaching, music playlists, and mixes, a moods tracker, a community of like-minded people, and a gratitude journal are some of the rewarding resources that have been added for you to have an enjoyable and life-changing experience with the app.

A good number of features in Aura can be accessed for free but certain features need payment.

17. Meditation Timer Pro

This app is more focused on the optimization of each meditation session. First of all, there are default sessions that come with the app, and you are also allowed to customize your own. Secondly, you are allowed to add beginning time, interval time, and cool down time within your sessions.

Thirdly, you can set the sounds you want to hear through the different phases of each meditation session, whether it is the beginning, the switching phase (depending on your practice), and the cold down phase, you can have something for every phase.

There are also cool background photos you can use with your sessions, and you get to change them by shaking your phone.

Other great features within the app include the ability to hide the timer, adding meditation logs automatically and manually, statistics of your sessions and app usage, protection of your passwords, adding a 3D Touch function, iPod media background support, and many others.

Also, the app allows functionalities like Dropbox backup and restore, data transfer to the Apple Health app, and iCloud backup and restore.

The app is paid for, right off the bat, with a price tag of $2.49.

18. Simple Habit Sleep, Meditation

Simple Habit is an all-rounded app that seeks to help you through your work, health, marriage, parenthood, and your life as a whole.

The app offers guided sleep sessions, mindfulness and meditation sessions, coaching, and daily motivations in the mentioned areas. These sessions have a duration of 5 minutes and users are encouraged to use them every day. They have been made by self-improvement experts who have worked with Google as well as former monks.

Extra features include offline access, motivational talks, progress tracking, streak tracking, and the ability to link your meditation sessions with the Apple Health app.

There is a free limited version with the upgrade option to access premium features.

Conclusion

There you go! The top iOS meditation apps to work with.

We encourage you to take a careful look at each and see what features it offers which might be right up your alley and then settle for the one that has most of your preferred features. If you are ready to invest in the premium features right away, the better. You will get to unlock full access to the apps’ features.

However, if you are not yet ready to pay, you can work with the free account which also offers a lot of value, for someone who’s just getting started and willing to make meditation part of their life.

Which app did you like? Which do you feel has the best features and you wish you knew about earlier? Please let us know in the comments. 🙂